Are we having fun yet?

One day, our USA acquaintance came asking if we could assemble a simple website for ABCDE*  – an academic partnership that specialises in cancer research. Something WordPress-based, corresponding to their other sites, but academically elegant – no bells and whistles because no one there has time and energy to curate this site. 

Why not? Let’s do this! 

We disassembled the existing website, recreated the partnership’s logo in higher resolution and a bit cleaner colour palette for the lack of the original one, and picked a WordPress theme to quickly mock a simple site and consult the new aesthetics with the client reps. They were really happy with our ideas and raised no concerns. 

Not even one? 🥺

Ok. We could dig deeper into the project then. The outdated look and feel of the original website was only the tip of the iceberg. Finding anything there posed a challenge worthy of a clever and persistent researcher, hence the entire information architecture had to be reshaped. That meant reading each and every page of that website, and that’s where things got a bit personal. 

At that time, I was impatiently waiting for the histopathology of my skin biopsy, reading my mum’s epicrisis about cancerous cells found in the recently resected lobe of her lung, and reading the entire ABCDE content, lung cancer screening pamphlets included… And it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I reached out to our acquaintance, apologising for making horridly slow progress, but instead of disappointment, I heard some words of compassion and reassurance that the project was going well; everyone was pleased with our work and happy to wait until this whole ruckus calmed down – as long as it’s OK with me. 

Say what? 🥺

The client even entrusted us with making another website at the same time because they were dissatisfied with the work done by another studio, which we happily embraced. I mean, that was oddly comforting 

One eternity later

The live ABCDE website hasn’t changed a bit. 

We sent the freshly finished website packed and ready for deployment. It got parked aside for some time because nobody had time to make the last step. When the client managed to run it, eventually, it put the publishing to a halt, allegedly having trouble recognising the design.  

At first, we were a bit angry with ourselves for not having a very formal and robust confirmation of approval, but on second thought, we realised that it wasn’t a matter of funding or radical actions – just keeping the new website away from the public. 

Hardly anyone confirmed that it was the accepted design; they claimed they didn’t recognise it. Further in the discussion, it occurred that some of the most active stakeholders changed their jobs, and they have no way of vouching for any version. And there was the Boss saying that the illustrations (provided by the client) were bland, and the researcher profiles were not interactive enough. With all those early joyful reactions and approvals, that didn’t make any sense now.

Was that really about the researcher profiles? 

Heck no! The suggested changes were, hypothetically, the lowest-hanging fruit that allowed the Boss to feel included in the process, make some artistic decisions, and show some extra skills. The chaotic, emotional communication was just camouflage for the following biases that impacted this person’s judgement: 

The need for mastery

Some people feel a strong urge to prove their worth and showcase their abilities in miscellaneous areas of expertise as well as in social situations such as family dinners. This could stem from an innate drive to improve and excel or simply from a desire to be recognized and valued by others. Whatever the reason, the need for mastery can motivate individuals to pursue new skills, take on challenges, or play a know-it-all.

The desire for a sense of purpose

People want to find intention and meaning in their lives by pursuing jobs, relationships, and activities that align with their values and passions. Having a clear sense of direction and feeling that they are contributing to something greater than themselves is crucial for overall well-being and life satisfaction. When individuals feel that their actions have purpose and significance, they are more likely to be motivated, engaged, and fulfilled.

An intimate connection 

People tend to favour things they have a personal connection to. This devotion based on emotions and memories can greatly influence our decision-making and lead us to gravitate towards products, events, and relationships that feel personally meaningful to us. 

It all falls under the umbrella of the IKEA Effect.

Those are techniques, heuristics, strategies, and biases we all leverage to provide users with the best experience possible. Yet, we sometimes forget about them when managing the remainder of the stakeholders. Let’s dig a bit deeper into the sorcery of doing things together, then, shall we?

Sriracha

Our adventure with this project grew from a call for front-end assistance with a small feature to fairly extensive support in product management. Surely, there were some issues that are common when one is taking over someone else’s job: 

…we-didn’t-make-it-itis

The lack of a personal connection can demotivate one to work on an acquired project and make one look at various aspects of it much more sceptically.

Irrational rationalisations

Not all our ideas need to be received with immediate enthusiasm by people who have not put them forward themselves. But also, when attached to a developed product, for example, we may be missing a piece of the wider context. 

Sunken costs and emotions

Regardless of the condition of the project, our fresh critical eye of one party can generate the desire for drastic changes in the code or interface. Such revolutions without an in-depth context may, for example, meet resistance from the environment, lack economic justification, or be perceived as a personal taunt.

The paper will accept everything

In theory, everything was perfectly fine with the project when I took over the mockup. The declared design process could be more or less arranged into some kind of a double-diamond diagram. The owner explained that the product had grown so much that the original freelance designer couldn’t squeeze it into the schedule – which sounded sensible since evolution requires care and supervision. There was even a hint of developer handoff via InVision. 

A hint indeed…

Looking closely at the mockup, you could see behind the rows of automatically aligned artboards one MASSIVE mess of unnamed layers, duplicated templates, tonnes of shades of each colour, randomly created symbols, and no design tokens whatsoever. Further investigation showed that there was little match between the mockup and the live product – that eventually proved to be the upside. I just ditched the Sketch file and started building the mockup and design system in Figma from scratch with no remorse. But it crossed my mind that maybe the team was secretly hoping I’d help clean up the jumble that didn’t match the postcard-perfect process. 

My early contributions to the Sriracha were fairly small and limited to individual parts of the system, which was a nice way to warm up and get acquainted with the project and the team dynamics with little threat to the project. The quality of the input from the research team was a bit baffling, with sketches that didn’t reflect the hierarchy of elements and sections marked as “Not relevant for <<name>>”, which actually contained the meatiest information for the excluded person. I remained rose-coloured, thinking that it was just a hiccup and we’d iron out all those kinks along the way. But the first large task sneaked in, opening Pandora’s box when no one expected it. 

Just as usual, I received another wireframe with a greyish mass of rectangles and a few notes but little context or additional comments. Even the feature name was kind of cryptic. Initially, I was convinced it was another minor addition to the system, and I confused everything, missing the point entirely in my interpretation. However, my front-end colleagues had problems comprehending the guidelines as well. This failure raised some suspicions that maybe my intuition or know-how was (subconsciously) making up for a deep problem undermining this product team. I decided to take radical measures by following the official documents almost religiously, adding from myself only the parts that the research team had forgotten about. The resulting UI was extremely badly received by the client – except for the views, which I created on my own. 

Interesting 🤔

It came out that not only had no one seen or accepted the design guidelines, but also half of the product team didn’t know that this feature already existed in the accompanying mobile app, and, at worst, we could have copy-pasted the old UI. The Sriracha product team was then like a few towers of Babel – speaking different languages and not even trying to hop on one platform. 

Going full YOLO

The third version of documentation for the Feature was said to be seen and accepted by the client. It still lacked a lot of clarity. What was worse was that the researcher and the product owner were either frustrated with being way beyond the deadline or treated their work too personally (or both) because asking any questions openly was unwelcome. Fed up with this weird back & forth of the original process, I finished the mockup of the Minimum Lovable Version almost single-handedly and commanded a big retrospective with every team lead on the board to learn how the hell a 3-week feature took more than 6 months to conceive. You only live once, so commit yourself. 

Rounding up with people who functioned on the same product and never truly cooperated with each other or even had an honest conversation about their project environment was challenging, though so transformative. Everyone had some space for vocalizing their pains and frustrations, as well as moments of fulfilment, and suddenly realised that individual decisions contribute to the entire project – not only the performance of their respective fields – and by sharing ideas from the very start, we automatically made the app more inclusive and resilient to suboptimal conditions. When all the bad impressions had been resolved, perspectives shifted, conclusions noted, and backs patted, we came to the conclusion that it was actually fun to discuss and disagree with each other, and using the effects of our work felt extremely satisfying. 

Who would have thought? 🤔

They also committed to trying a workshop session in a similarly diverse line-up to align all the needs, requirements, threats, and opportunities before the next big task – not after the deployment. The result? After less than two hours (counting only the meeting time), we spoke the same language and had the base work covered for all the teams. Now, every medium to extra-large story starts with at least a brief kick-off workshop to keep the knowledge flowing. 

Some might think that it’s no accomplishment to bring on board people who are on your level or lower because they will follow the hierarchy or team companionship, and such devices won’t work with executives and other serious or distant stakeholders. Well, hold my coffee mug. 

ACME

Makimo has already done a hefty amount of work helping people in ACME improve the time they spend processing the data and assuring its quality. Yet for quite a few years, all the changes were not obvious to the eyesight until one year, when the upper management called for rethinking the user experience of the key points of data collection and monitoring. 

Running any marathon was less intimidating than that

We’re talking about a makeover of a very specific system used in every country on our planet by people with different levels of expertise and cultural backgrounds. It was also a combination of tight deadlines, immense domain knowledge spread across various stakeholders, certain jargon in four languages (and two writing systems), and some codebase black magic – a truly exciting yet intimidating project.

On the surface, we were managing around 100 deceptively innocent-looking forms gathered in a super long list of links with an optional icon at the end. But each form can have one of three applicabilities, up to five different characteristics, and several states. With the joint effort of all the teams, we managed to display more of the likely important details about each form, reduce the cognitive load with staged disclosure, and still keep the indelible complexity out of public view. 

Finishing the first version of the refreshed user flow meant doing a walkthrough with a person from the upper management who… I feel scared of. Some advised me to polish the whole concept and maybe send it as a PDF for a simple yay/nay to avoid live discussion and potentially tough questions. 

Playing correspondence chess has always been a real deal, even via homing pigeons, so you can successfully hold an engaging design discussion in an email thread. A great deal of the initial discussions in this project happened asynchronically within Figma comments. The only thing that changes is the medium, but that won’t magically make the encounter more comfortable. Last but not least, I’m actually spectacularly shy when it comes to online presence, emails, and instant messages; therefore, this option wasn’t tempting at all. 

Worst case scenario: we will all get bored

Striving for approval and comfort might turn you into a serial people pleaser and has nothing to do with building meaningful relationships or inclusive products. In some cases, it might all the more be a flow breaker because you might focus more on yourself than the quality of your contribution to the project. You might refrain from making a controversial yet valid point in the discussion or, on the contrary, occupy too much space to ensure that your arguments shine through. So, contrary to my colleagues’ genuinely empathic suggestions, I intentionally left a few rough edges on the canvas, wore a comfy jumper and joined the bunch on the call. When I heard “Let me entertain an idea…” in my AirPods, I felt a deep wave of relief at the back of my head. 

*En-ter-tain…* 🥺 

This presentation wasn’t planned to be a workshop with engaging activities, yet someone played with this design. The mockup had to be fairly neat, not to draw attention to the visual effects, but open enough to spark some discussions about the essence of the project. 

Saving the world still counts if you’re having fun doing this

We also had some impromptu laughs about my workspace. To clearly mark the areas in progress and document doubts, changes and technical details, I exaggerated my handwritten-like notes with stock illustrations of animals. Their style couldn’t be mistaken with the actual mockup; they were large and always visible on the canvas, so no one could say they had missed those annotations. And some of them included silly puns that compensated for my imposter syndrome. I hadn’t hidden these comments before the call, they were my lifeline in case of a brain freeze and, apparently, good mood boosters. 

Were we having fun then? 

According to Catherine Price, True Fun is the blend of three psychological states: connection, flow, and playfulness. 

Connection refers to sharing experiences and developing social links with people. 

Flow is often described as a state of total concentration on an optimally challenging activity that doesn’t require high skill utilisation. 

Playfulness is about the lighthearted attitude that encourages us to seek entertainment in a run-of-the-mill life. 

Humour and laughter are very delicate matters, and the more cross-cultural winds blow, the more challenging it is to land a joke safely – not only in a business context – and any jokes were the least important element of that call and its vibe. The big deal here was that all the party people felt relaxed and present enough to connect in a playful flow to solve the user experience issues. Therefore, given Price’s model, we were having True Fun without being unprofessional or diminishing the world’s problems! 

Why do we need fun anyway? 

While Price focuses mostly on personal experiences, those three elements can be easily translated into business realities if we stop enforcing individual and cultural manners such as laughter, small talk, or eye contact, and accept that building connections doesn’t necessarily mean making friends or intimate relationships. And it is precisely fun that characterises the lifeblood of play, identified as the central element in human culture, including law, war, science, poetry, philosophy, and art by Johan Huizinga (“Homo Ludens. A Study of the Play Element in Culture”, 1955), one of the founders of modern cultural history. 

Barbara Lee Fredrickson (“Positivity”, 2009) developed the concept that positive emotional states lead to new ideas, activities, and social connections that strengthen our physical, intellectual, social, and psychological resources which, in consequence, improve our odds of survival. Put another way: if we want to live on and evolve, we should seek fun in our activities. In fact, even recollecting the moments of fun can increase people’s satisfaction, reduce levels of the stress hormone – cortisol, and increase levels of feel-good ones. On their forefront, we have dopamine – a biomolecule that helps us internalise experiences essential for the survival of our species, such as eating, drinking coffee, exercising, acquiring new skills, or social bonding. 

This translates into people reporting lower anxiety and self-criticism, sharpened senses, and improved focus and memory when having fun. Those are exactly the traits you should be looking for during a meeting, a workshop, another collaboration, or the user experience your product provides. The latter can be expressed not only as gamification but, first and foremost, as a consistent, unbroken flow, speaking users’ language, user control, and freedom – which are the bread and butter of any good product. 

So go ahead, embrace the fun in life and enjoy the benefits it brings!

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All projects were anonymised for various reasons, and there’s no point in searching for the code names – they were not important to the narration anyway.